Hope Watson, an undergraduate student, is looking at some of the toughest questions in public health— and she believes the solutions will be found in data. Watson took first place in the analytics category of this year’s Temple University Alexion Analytics Challenge, an annual competition at Temple sponsored by pharmaceutical company Alexion and other healthcarerelated companies. We talked with her about her passion for analytics and her plans to take her Temple education around the world.
How did you approach this year’s challenge?
The focus of this year’s competition was on healthcare, and the challenge looked at clinical trials of treatments for rare diseases. That’s exactly the area I hope to go into, so it was exciting. There are over 7,000 rare diseases, and together they affect about 10% of the U.S. population—but most of them have no cures or treatments. So when you look at it from a population health perspective, we’re really just leaving these people behind. That bothers me. The challenge came with essentially no data—the point was to go find what would work best. It was so different from a normal academic project, where the data would’ve just been provided for me. So I saw this as a sandbox opportunity. I found an enormous database that shows every single clinical trial that’s ever been done in the U.S., and I wrote my own statistical analysis tools for it. Then I started asking questions: How are rare disease clinical trials different from those for non-rare diseases? Where are they underperforming? And what caliber of data analysis do I need to present so that it would be considered in a boardroom? I wanted to be able to put this in front of a company who could say, “We can actually use this.” The competition felt very intense. Those of us who were selected as the top 20 participants had to give a four-minute pitch to defend our work in front of pharmaceutical company CIOs and other executives. It required a very different mindset than I have when I’m just putting the information together. The pressure helps you grow very fast—it’s exciting.
What were your conclusions for improving rare disease clinical trials?
What I proposed is that we really have to get away from institution-centered clinical trials. Trials should be about the patient, because if you don’t have the patient, the clinical trial fails. That costs everybody a lot of money, the patient doesn’t receive treatment, and we don’t make any progress. Right now it all revolves around the few facilities that can actually host trials like this. So instead, I proposed making data infrastructures available for every hospital within 30 miles of a participant – making it possible for just about every hospital to run a clinical trial.
Is this something you would hope to work on after you graduate?
Definitely. I’m leaning toward the policy side, working in a department of health. They track a lot of metrics across entire populations, not just people that are being actively recruited the way they would be at a company. Ultimately I’m looking at changing how we handle clinical trials from both a policy side and from a technology side.
If you’re going to change policy, who do you need to convince? What arguments do you make?
The biggest argument is proving to pharmaceutical and healthcare companies that they can actually save money if they do things differently. The United States spends more money on healthcare and has worse health outcomes than many other countries. So when you get down to it, this is really a resource issue. It’s a matter of convincing companies to band together to invest in a new clinical trial infrastructure so that they can share data and processes together, and so that each company doesn’t have to do the same thing. That’s not something that companies are willing to do right now, and it’s impeding true drug innovation. So we need to find ways to quantify how much money they’re going to save on drug development for both rare diseases and non-rare diseases. I feel like we’re moving in the right direction. There are companies that have already jumped through the legal hoops to make this possible. They’re already doing it, so there’s no reason for other companies not to. It’s just about what’s culture in the industry, and who’s willing to fail, and possibly fail hard, to make it work.
You’re a senior now—what are your plans for the next year?
I’m graduating this May with a kinesiology major and a public health minor. I’m applying to epidemiology and biostatistics programs in the UK – Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Leeds. I’d like to work in the UK because they have nationalized healthcare, so it’s possible to draw on much larger data sets.
How do you envision your future role in public health? I’m really interested in innovation. To me, public health is about taking all of this clinical and everyday data, giving meaning to it, and putting it in a perspective where people can actually begin to treat and prevent illness. A lot of what epidemiologists do when they graduate—and this is what I hope to do—is to design better clinical trials. The beauty of my field is that everybody needs healthcare, and there’s innovation happening in biostatistics and bioinformatics that is really pushing the boundaries. It puts the ‘public’ in public health.